A few weeks after the first public mentions of Vivek Kundra's IT Dashboard, it's out.

Kundra demo'd the dashboard for a few of us yesterday, and it's astonishing how quickly his office--a government one, no less--put together something so polished. I hope the dashboard becomes a model as well as a supervisor for government software development.

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran's information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn't have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there's more to it than that. I'm conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. We practiced distributed, citizen-based warfare. That is frightening. Here is how my thinking evolved throughout the day:

Having worked as an intelligence analyst for a few years at the Department of Defense, I try to dispel the notion that the job requires a special skillset. It doesn't. It is simply research, and the job is little different from any other research-based position: you gather observations, think about them, and write a report. Nothing special there. Analysts do have access to secrets, but even that doesn't completely set them apart from others: some intelligence scholars believe that the majority of strategic decisions can be made with 100% public information.

I was taken aback by email from devex on Monday that said "Buried in the $787 billion economic stimulus legislation ...is $286 million for technology upgrades at the U.S. Agency for International Development." I mean, USAID is the definition of "dinosaur". They'll never spend that much money well. But it was really driven home to me be by the article in Washington Technology which cut to the chase - "In a recently released study, research firm IDC estimates that the stimulus will generate more than $100.1 billion in technology spending during the next five years." I'm getting it. We're going to spend a lot of money on technology in the next few years. What do we do to make it worthwhile?

I really like the approach that Forum One is pitching - defining "shovel-ready" online, civic-infrastructure projects [disclaimer, though I no longer work there, I helped found Forum One, have great affection for the place, and have an ongoing financial interest. That said, this is still a good idea.] As Forum One CEO Chris Wolz explains, these initiatives will "enable governments, nonprofits, citizens and businesses to work together to solve important social problems." These are the modern equivalent of traditional infrastructure which has included "town halls, the highway system, and government R&D labs."

So far they've proposed five projects and are looking for ideas for five more. Here is the first batch: